I've been playing PA with a personal goal of being able to intake every prisoner possible. To my knowledge, the prisoners back up in a queue waiting to get into the prison, so my thinking was that I would work to construct a prison which could outpace the rate of prisoner generation, and then simply let it do its thing until the queue was empty and I was relying on the newly generated prisoners each day to fill cells.

However, I haven't found anything on how the game comes up with how many prisoners of each type to generate each day. Purely based on observation without recording or testing, it seems that it might be dependent on several factors:

1) Time; the number of prisoners generated per day feels like it increases with time, which basically sabotages my plan, since if they number of prisoners generated just goes up every day, there's no way I can ever keep ahead of it (eventually, it will outpace me).

2) Prison size; specifically, the number of available beds. This is something I can work around, but it's not something that I've really tested, and I'd like to find out if there's some way to determine it. Effectively, the work around would be to maintain a certain number and size of holding cells.

3) Prisoner intake; it seems as though intaking only min sec prisoners causes the game to only generate min sec prisoners. This, again, is not something I've tested, but it would also break my plan as it means I'm basically in control of the crime rate, and that I don't ever need to adapt except by choice.

If anyone has any solid information about how the prisoners are generated, I'd be appreciative. I would dig into the code, but it seems a little dishonest, and I'm always scared of breaking something.